Re: [Fwd: Re: commit: AbiWord is now a Nautilus View.]

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On Mon, 31 Mar 2003, Gregory Merchan wrote:

> On Mon, Mar 31, 2003 at 11:08:09AM -0500, Alexander Larsson wrote:
> > You keep saying [a non-editing view] gets in the way more often than not,
> > but you give no reason or argument why this is so. In my experience
> > files/documents are read more often than they are edited/written, so I
> > would say views that view the content of files are not pointless. . . .
> 
> If you wish to view a document and it opens in a editor, all is well.*
> If you wish to view a document and it opens in a viewer, all is well.
> If you wish to edit a document and it opens in a editor, all is well.
> If you wish to edit a document and it opens in a viewer, you're screwed.

I think you are oversimplifying this. An viewer is not an editor with
editing disabled. A viewer is an application specifically designed for
viewing a file, with the features and user interface suited to view
files of a particular type, including functionallity an editor might
just not have (e.g. an image viewer might have fullscreen mode, while
gimp doesn't). Using such a viewer to show e.g. your photos gives a
much better user experience than launching the gimp for every file. 

Furthermore, we're currently talking about views that are embedded in
Nautilus. I think the idea of launching a full-featured editing app
such as e.g. the Gimp inside Nautilus is really bad. I mean, what are
you gonna do with all the tool windows and other UI you need? The
nautilus window will suddenly launch palette windows and allow stuff
such as opening a new view of the image (does that open a gimp window
or a Nautilus window?).

As an example of viewers vs editors, take the component in question:
http://www.abisource.com/information/news/2003/nautilus-abiword.png

Clearly its a bug that it has its own menu bar, ideally it should use
menu merging so that there is only one menu/toolbar set.

If you were to actually use this to edit a document we'd quickly see
some issues:
* The menus are full of items from nautilus that are just in the way
  when editing. In fact they are dangerous. If you accidentally select
  something in the "Bookmarks" menu thinking it has something to do
  with bookmarks in documents you'll go to some other location,
  possibly losing your work. 
* There is some amount of duplication in the UI, which can lead to
  confusion. Take for instance Preferences. Is it the Nautilus prefs
  or the AbiWord prefs? Or the Zoom widgets, which is duplicated in
  the Nautilus menu/toolbar and the AbiWord menu.
* If you enable the AbiWord toolbars the amount of menus/toolbars in
  the window will be huge, giving you little area to edit in.
  You can of course disable the Nautilus toolbars you don't use while
  editing the document, however this has side-effects such as changing
  the nautilus show toolbar prefs.
* A lot of the normal functionallity in AbiWord has to be disabled
  since it makes little sense. For instance, none of Open, New, recent
  files or New Window work well when there AbiWord widget is
  controlled and embedded by another application.
* Keyboard shortcut conflicts. Does Ctrl-B mean "Bold" or does it mean
  "Edit Bookmarks"?
  
However, if you were to redesign the AbiWord component with the
intention of making it a kick ass way to view existing documents, and
browse among documents in Nautilus you would make some changes that
makes no sense for an editor:

* Remove the toolbars and rulers to get more screen space to read in.
* Use the nautilus menus and other UI functionallity for things like
  zoom and text copy, avoiding duplication.
* Merge in a few easy to find operations in the menus to do things you
  commonly want do do when viewing a document, such as: print, view
  fullscreen, text search, fit to width etc.
* Be able to have a very short context menu with only the few
  operations you are normally interested in.
* Maybe add some navigation features not in AbiWord, such as a table
  of content dialog that lets you see what page sections are on and
  lets you go there quickly.
* Allow key navigation to be more natural for reading a
  document. Arrow  keys scroll, page up/down flips pages. No need to
  move the cursor around unless you specifically want to select some
  text to copy it. 


If you were to do something like this it would be true value-add,
not just a new (slightly worse) way to edit documents. If you want to
edit or write a document you'd use the best way to do that (i.e. AbiWord), 
but if you're just browsing around looking at documents you get a really
slick, integrated and efficient way to do that.

Now, that would rock!

-- 
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 Alexander Larsson                                            Red Hat, Inc 
                   alexl redhat com    alla lysator liu se 
He's an immortal native American paranormal investigator from a doomed world. 
She's a chain-smoking Buddhist opera singer who hides her beauty behind a pair 
of thick-framed spectacles. They fight crime!